A social media firestorm involving a River Region credit union is burning after an alleged breach of customer privacy by a credit union employee. Max Credit Union customers are demanding answers after they claim an employee shared a customer’s personal information on Facebook.

The Senior VP of Marketing at Max Credit Union confirmed the credit union was alerted to the alleged incident last Thursday and that there is an investigation underway led by “legal authorities”. The Max employee has been placed on leave.

Facebook is already a hotbed for your hypochondriac and conspiracy theorist friends to post poorly sourced or blatantly false medical information — like the bogus “Johns Hopkins Cancer Update” that pops up every few months — but the social network apparently wants to be more actively involved in the collecting and sharing of healthcare information to its users.

Are you uncomfortable with the information Facebook shares about you with third-party apps and websites? Good news: Facebook has a solution.

Facebook on Wednesday unveiled an anonymous login feature that allows users to sign into apps without sharing their identities. The apps will be forbidden from collecting personal data from people who use the feature.

It’s not the premise of a sci-fi novel. Internet-connected TVs are watching you now.

A second blogger has published evidence that his LG-manufactured smart television is sharing sensitive user data with the Korea-based company in a post that offers support for the theory that the snooping isn’t isolated behavior that affects a small number of sets.

In addition to transmitting a list of shows being watched and the names of files contained on USB drives, the Internet-connected TV also sent the names of files shared on home or office networks, the blogger reported. He made the discovery after plugging the Wireshark packet-sniffing program into his home network and noticing that an LG TV—model number 42ls570, purchased in April—was transmitting file names that sounded vaguely familiar even though there was no USB drive plugged in.

Netflix is now free to create a U.S. Facebook app that shares users’ viewing history if they opt in, after the company successfully lobbied Congress to amend a 1988 law.

A Netflix spokesman said the company “will launch social features in the U.S.” sometime in 2013. The law in question, called the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), previously prohibited “a video tape service provider” from revealing customer information without the customer’s written consent.

Facebook no longer represents that it offers privacy as a matter of policy, like some other companies do. It states outright that it will use your data. It has a Data Use Policy instead of a Privacy Policy.

But consider the dictionary definition of privacy: 1) The state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people; 2) The state of being free from public attention. If that’s your gold standard, then you cannot use Facebook or any other online service for that matter, at least not without privacy-protecting technology. Once you venture online, once you share, you’re talking about something less than privacy. Online services may talk about how they respect privacy, but they should really be talking about data usage and sharing.